Meet the 2014 Founders: MyPrepApp. Motivation, Not Information.
Vaclav Formanek, getting passionate about education.
Vasek, tell us about MyPrepApp, and Educasoft.
MyPrepApp is a mobile and web application that helps students to achieve on their important exams. It’s a way for students to avoid the stress of major exams without avoiding the actual studying: it gives you a reason to study, and it makes the process fun, and, we hope, a lot less painful.
Did you have trouble studying as a kid?
I was a kind of nerd as a kid. I started to have some problems with studying at high school and university, as I found there were much more interesting things to do than studying.
I started this project with my best friend Ondřej Menčel (Ondřej is CTO of Educasoft) more than two years ago. We loved playing games and we were fascinated with their motivational power. We were asking ourselves a question: if games are so cool that they motivate us to spend hours and hours solving problems in a virtual world, couldn’t we use some of their power to motivate ourselves to do real things, such as studying?
I was never a good studier. I guess that’s the typical experience, but it creates a lot of stress. I couldn’t ever decided what the important stuff was, and how to prioritize when I was studying. So I would procrastinate, and end up cramming for the exam at the last second out of panic. Everybody’s had that experience right? Studying was boring and nothing motivated me to start early. Have you ever had that dream where you show up for a test, but you aren’t prepared, and you don’t know what to do? That’s our inspiration.
MyPrepApp is molded out of our personal experiences. It creates a tailored study plan for exam preparation, and uses game rewards and support of friends to enhance students´ motivation to follow the plan and reach their study goals.
When I am saying “we” I am talking about our company Educasoft. Educasoft is a team of people who want to provide students a better way to prepare for exams.
Ondrej and Vasek taking a break on the TechSquare swing set.
Your team has already launched and generated revenue with a similar service in the Czech Republic: Hrave.cz. How did Hrave become MyPrepApp?
Well, we launched “Maturita hravě,” our first product, in preparation for the Czech exit examination, just a few days before the exam actually took place. So it was really a baptism by fire. It was just a last minute thing, so you can see a pattern here!
But, we were really surprised by the results. Within the first week, more than 5000 students tried out Hrave, and feedback was mostly very positive. When we were thinking what to do next, we decided to focus on what was crucial for passing the exam, and what’s really missing from existing products for exam preparation: tailored study plans and enhanced motivation to study. User feedback showed that the main problem with studying wasn’t informational, but motivational. This became the basis of the MyPrepApp model.
The education technology field is crowded. What makes MyPrepApp a potential stand-out in your thinking?
We take a different approach towards studying for exams. We see achieving on exams as the same type of goal as, for example, being able to run a marathon or losing 10 kilos, and we think we can use similar methods to help people achieve these goals. That´s why we are inspired by successful fitness and running apps such as Endomondo.
We are focused on students with low self-motivation. Students who need a study plan and who need to be intensively pushed to follow it. We think that this group of students has been ignored by existing exam preparation products. Most of these, like Kaplan Test Prep, Magoosh, or BenchPrep just assume the student is motivated from the outset… but we know that isn’t the case.
Our goal is to be the best preparation app for those students – the ones who need someone to tell them what to study and motivate them to do so.
What are the technical and business challenges you think you’re going to face in the next year or so?
The big technical challenge for us is creation of the study plan. We take it very seriously, as by recommending what students should study, we become partly responsible for them and their results. To be able to create a good study plan, we need to combine knowledge from many different areas – from the perfect knowledge of tests to the psychology of learning.
As for business challenges the biggest one will be to entry the US market. I think we will need a business partner to do it in the most effective way.
What strategy are you pursuing for bringing the platform to a global market? How will you secure and grow a strong content network?
We have been developing the platform itself to be content independent, so it can be used for most of standardized exams, no matter which system they are for, in Czech republic, Poland or the US. While the exam systems are very different between different countries, our approach can remain constant.
As it is quite easy for content creators to use our platform, we can choose the best strategy for getting the relevant educational content for different countries and exams. Similarly, we can choose the best strategy to market MyPrepApp in different countries. We are now in the process of deciding for which countries to find strategic partners, and in which we can branch out on our own.
Which of the mentors at StartupYard have had the most profound impact on Educasoft during the past few months? How has the accelerator been for your team?
Generally the mentor sessions have helped us a lot to make our plans more precise, and prioritize the next steps. Roman Smola (Founder of Glogster EDU) had amazing knowledge about how to be successful in the US market with educational products. Vit Horky (CEO of Brand Embassy) has a really interesting approach to business development, that we learned a lot from.
Unfortunately I was the only team member who could atend most of the program during the first month of the accelerator as the rest of the team had to stay home working on the app so we could launch it as soon as possible. Though we find the accelerator very useful.
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